Site redesign/cleanup SEO Advice

[okuma]

Hi Everyone, New member here, but loving it. I have some questions that I couldn't find the answers to. We are radically changing our site. Over the years it has accumulated thousands of garbage files, WP installations, etc.

We enjoy good rankings for lots of our keywords.

Are there articles/advice/suggestions on how to do this with the least harm to our rankings?

One of the largest concerns is for pages currently ranked and we want to move them to blog posts with a preceding /blog/ in the url. The filename, title, etc. will all remain identical.

the url is www.wulongforlife.com

Sure appreciate any advice.

Thanks in advance.

[okuma]

Thank you Mark.

Wow, what a comprehensive response. I appreciate it.

I have also found some more info doing further research.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

I will continue to post info here as I find it.

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Julia-

Good problem to have. I can provide you with some overall suggestions related to what you need to focus on as we have brought over 20+ wordpress sites this year that are in a similar situation.  Good content; good ranking; need to clean it up but dont want to lose any seo value.....

Here are some of the most important items:

• Make sure you do an upfront XML sitemap audit so you know exactly what you have. This is your opportunity to reformat it if it needs it and make sure the site is set up correctly.
• Make sure you do a crawl of the site immediately prior to making any changes so you can use it as the benchmark for what you have today and to make sure you are improving in all areas. Make sure you understand everything that is being indexed and everything that isnt being indexed.
• You care the most about content that is being indexed. So make sure you focus on that content and conversion first.
• Make sure you back up the site in its entirety. If something weird happens, you want to be able to reinstall and start back at step 1.
• You want to make sure that as you move over pages that are currently ranked that you make as few changes as possible.....Keepng the url the same with the preceding blog is a good strategy......another option might be to leave the url structure exactly the same and doing a 301 redirect from the new url might be a solid solution if there is any impact to page ranking when you change the url by adding a preceding /blog/ in the url. (IMPORTANT NOTE: You will lose a small amount of linkjuice if you do a 301 redirect. It never transfers 100% of the linkjuice.)
• Make sure you challenge some of your wordpress plugins you are using. Many of the older plugins I have been using over the last 9 months, even though i continue to install updates, have been outdone by new plugins. This is your chance to make sure you have the best. (For example I use to use an old google analytics plug-in that was solid. The new google analyticator is much easier and has more functionality and provides me a dashboard view that is handy.)
• Make sure if you have pages that have backlinks that you bring them over with the same url structure or that you do redirects from the old to the new, so that you still get the link juice.

Hope this helps.

Mark